I'm a privacy pragmatist, writing about the intersection of law, technology, social media and our personal information. If you have story ideas or tips, e-mail me at khill@forbes.com. PGP key here.
These days, I'm a senior online editor at Forbes. I was previously an editor at Above the Law, a legal blog, relying on the legal knowledge gained from two years working for corporate law firm Covington & Burling -- a Cliff's Notes version of law school.
In the past, I've been found slaving away as an intern in midtown Manhattan at The Week Magazine, in Hong Kong at the International Herald Tribune, and in D.C. at the Washington Examiner. I also spent a few years traveling the world managing educational programs for international journalists for the National Press Foundation.
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Facebook Graph Search Shows You 'Married People Who Like Prostitutes' And 'Employers Of People Who Like Racism'

'Married people who like prostitutes.' Facebook suggests you check out their spouses.

When Facebook launched its social search engine “Graph Search” last week, I suggested that Facebook stalking would now be limited only by users’ creativity in coming up with search queries. Well, congratulations to Tom Scott who has won the creativity prize with his Tumblr, Actual Facebook Graph Searches. He’s posting and crowd-sourcing a series of searches that surface potentially embarrassing, hypocritical, threatening or unsavory information about Facebook users, such as:

“Current employers of people who like Racism”

“Spouses of married people who like [cheat-on-your-partner dating site] Ashley Madison”

“Family members of people who live in China and like [the very very banned] Falun Gong”

“Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran”

“People who like Focus on the Family [anti gay marriage] and Neil Patrick Harris [very gay and due to be married with kids]”

“Single women who live nearby and who are interested in men and like Getting Drunk”

“Mothers of Catholics from Italy who like Durex”

There is no private information unintentionally exposed here. It isn’t as Gizmodo quipped in a post last week that “people are now sharing horrible things about themselves thanks to Facebook Search.” They were already sharing these things. These are simply interesting juxtapositions of public information that was previously harder to access and display. For example, one could have gone to the public “Racism” page and looked at a list of everyone who liked it (hopefully ironically) and then looked through their profiles to figure out who their employers were, but it involved more steps. Facebook has simply done what any good tech company should do — remove those onerous steps and make it much easier to find out who’s racist, who’s cheating, who wants to get drunk tonight, or, perhaps best of all, all of the above.

The exposure of this information in this form isn’t a matter of private information being breached; instead it’s a matter of obscurity being reduced — a differentiation well explored by Woodrow Harzog and Evan Sellinger in The Atlantic. Increasingly, in this age of big data, better search tools, and ease of posting information, we’re encountering more and more often discomfort around the idea of public data being made more public, as a New York newspaper discovered when it put public information about who had guns into an interactive map. Lots of people shot off about that one, including lawmakers, leading the newspaper to take down the map.

“I’m not sure I’m making any deeper point about privacy: I think, at this point, we’re basically all just rubbernecking – myself included,” says Scott by email. “Facebook does have good privacy settings: but there are many, many people who don’t know how to use them!”

That is a problem, and one that Graph Search could potentially help solve by demonstrating to people how public much of their content really is if they haven’t fooled around with their privacy settings.

“People are confused about their settings. Facebook has changed them so many times. If you haven’t locked down your privacy settings before, you should do it now,” says consumer privacy expert Justin Brookman of the Center for Democracy and Technology. “There’s a lagging awareness as to whether information should be public in the first place. The positive result of all this, though, is that people are becoming less and less stupid about information sharing. We’re catching up and we’re getting better.”

Though some people, like Ryan Tate of Wired, will likely want to share more because of Graph, because it just became a much more useful vehicle for searching for information about venues, restaurants, and vacation spots.

Another problem with all this is the expectation we bring to the data. We’re looking at these results as if all of this information is accurate, and that’s almost certainly wrong.

“There’s the fact that Facebook ‘likes’ and profile settings aren’t necessarily accurate reflections of reality,” writes Will Oremus at Slate. As commenter Julie Popp remarked on my last Facebook article in a seemingly endless series about the downsides of ‘Liking’:

A common joke among the males (especially freshman year) in a group of friends was to hack each others’ Facebook accounts when they left their computer unattended. Then the hacker would “like” incredible amounts of things that were usually funny, opposite of the victim’s political views, really awful boy bands or romantic comedies. It was all in good jest.

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There’s a wide spectrum in terms of people’s understanding of how Facebook works. My parents’ questions as to the workings of the site when I was home for Christmas really made that sink in for me. E.g. “How do you write a private message to someone else?” “If you post something to your Wall, someone has to come to your page to see it, right?” On top of that, Facebook is often changing how things work on the site; for the casual user, it can be hard to keep up.

I understand their confusion. However, Facebook’s privacy settings are well known to be both opaque and inconstant. Being less of a privacy pragmatist than you are, my thought is the only truly safe courses of action are either to (1) refrain from posting about, liking, commenting on, or otherwise interacting with anything that is truly private, or that you wouldn’t want your grandmother to read or (2) tell Mark Z. what you really think of his privacy policies, be brave and cancel your account.

I think you misread that blog post. These are real Graph searches (I tried them). He refers to the Tumblr as “a joke,” but he doesn’t mean “hoax.” He means it in the sense that it was intended to entertain, and he was surprised by the huge media reaction.